It was while reading his letter of termination, signed by the latest vague desperate interim nowhere man running the University of Louisville yet deeper into the ground. As she read the guy’s list of Rick’s evil evil deeds, which must be listed in this letter in order for the school to fire him with cause and get a forty-four million dollar discount on the transaction, the following exchange from Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? began running through my head:

George: You can sit there in that chair of yours, you can sit there with the gin running out of your mouth, and you can humiliate me, you can tear me apart … ALL NIGHT… and that’s perfectly all right … that’s OK…

Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!

George: I CANNOT STAND IT!

Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!! YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!!

George: (Quietly.). That is a desperately sick lie.

Martha here is ol’ Rick, hotly sought after by UL and paid seven million dollars a year because no one cheats their way to a championship like Rick; because Rick’s a winner who sees what he wants in a restaurant and fucks it right there on the table; he’s a guy whose recruitment coaches run whorehouses in basketball dormitories, and whose program pays the biggest bribes to high school players, and… Louisville married him for it!. It wanted a world of gin-pissed vulgarians and pin-striped dress for success hypocrites to keep the ball rolling, and it correctly identified and highly rewarded Pitino as THE man to provide it.

But now! Now, just because of a teeny DOJ and FBI crackdown, it’s suddenly ooh what a nasty unethical person you are! We cannot stand you!

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I’m afraid Rick is well within his rights, just as Martha is, to point out that these qualities and behaviors are exactly why UL fell so expensively in love with him in the first place. UL loved him so much that they let him sweep up most of the money available at the University of Louisville. It is impossible to find words to describe how much UL loved Rick Pitino, but it is quite possible to look at the immense money, power, and adoration they gladly gave him all those years. Because he won championships, and that’s all UL cares about and ever will care about because it’s Kentucky and it’s UL and that’s that. The next strutting multimillionaire fuckhead they bring on board to win championships will do exactly the same things to win them. Rick knows this, and has a right to feel aggrieved.

“You have to ask yourself, why would he lie about that? If he tells the truth, he’s not going to get in trouble, even if he took all sorts of benefits while he was there. It’s how the NCAA works. If he lied, and they can prove he lied, he won’t be able to play at Ohio State,” [a sports analyst] said.

In a hastily-called news conference, Coach Pitino said: “Well, what do you want? That’s what they pay me for.”

We shouldn’t forget, amid the current wrestling sex scandal and football domestic abuse scandal, significant alumni of that biggest of big-time sports universities. These are people whose words and actions speak the sorts of truths normally buried at places like OSU.

First let’s recall truth-bearer Cardale Jones, a football player who in 2012 tweeted:

Why should we have to go to class if we came here to play FOOTBALL, we ain’t come to play SCHOOL classes are POINTLESS.

Ol’ Cardale counts as a wise man at a place like Ohio State, that rare person willing to just come out with it. Got all kinds of heat for it, too — but looks like he’s getting a bit of his own back these days. His tweet about the domestic violence scandal is short and sweet and attracting a lot of attention:

Funny how life works.

It’s clearly a dig at the coach at the center of the scandal – Urban Meyer – who like Rick Pitino is a big fat hypocrite and no doubt gave Cardale hell for telling the truth way back when. Pretty nice karma, ain’t it, Cardale?

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And do not forget Kosta Karageorge, a mightily-concussed OSU wrestler/football player who one night dressed all in black, crawled into a dumpster, and shot his brains out. Reminiscent of Tyler Hilinski and quite a few other high-profile, macho, campus suicides, Karageorge’s mysterious gun-inflicted demise seems to carry important meanings about one form of young, heroic, American manhood.

[Former University of Louisville AD Tom] Jurich has been stung by the backlash that came along with his dismissal, but he owes it to a remarkable tolerance [at UL] for scandal. Rehiring tainted football coach Bobby Petrino in 2014 dented the school’s reputation, as did the multiple issues with [Rick] Pitino’s personal life and basketball program. Fixated on justifying Louisville’s inclusion in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Jurich was willing to take all the hits to the school’s image in exchange for on-field competitiveness.

… But now the school that compensated [Jurich and Pitino] at the very highest levels of their professions wants to blame the employees rather than itself for the current chaotic state of the department. Pitino was the active wrongdoer; we simply gave him more power than a third-world dictator. Jurich amassed too much clout; maybe because we paid him $5.3 million in 2016, more than the entire budget of the English, Math, Biology and History departments.

… Everyone needs a boss, and neither Pitino nor Jurich were adequately bossed in recent years. Former school president James Ramsey was busy arranging stealth sweetheart deals for himself and other university leaders (including Jurich), which helped lead to his ouster. The Board of Trustees was a rubber stamp. Lacking adequate oversight, the whole thing spun out of control.

And so we reach a point where the University of Louisville blames Pitino, and Pitino blames [his underlings] Andre McGee and Jordan Fair, and we’re supposed to believe that this institution led by wealthy and powerful alpha males was brought down by the sorcery of a former director of basketball operations and a first-year assistant coach. Call it trickle-up corruption.

The bit at the end about the alpha males is interesting… Is there even one woman at UL? As Fanny Dashwood would put it —